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| Strength for the Journey #6 We Are At Risk! |
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[Note: Preached as dialogue between John York and Rubel Shelly.]
Rubel Shelly: The watershed text of Hebrews came before us – in my opinion, at least – last Lord’s Day. Here are the words: “Although [Jesus] was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him and was designated by God to be high priest in the order of Melchizedek” (5:8-9).
I think everything prior to those three verses which had claimed superiority for Jesus over angels, Moses, Joshua, and Aaron was mere prelude to the great Christological confession of the perfection, saving power, and eternal high priesthood of the Lord Jesus Christ. The remainder of this sermon-epistle pulsates from this text. Specifically, discouraged and weak believers were exhorted to take heart from their leader. Just as he was perfected through suffering, so would they have to follow his lead. They should not be surprised at stress, opposition, or persecution. To the contrary, they should expect it. Am I right?
John York: I agree with you on both counts! Verses 8-9 of chapter five are critical to the preacher’s understanding of both the humanity and divinity of Jesus. He believes that the suffering experienced in earthly life by Jesus taught him how to be the Perfect Son. It is thus reasonable to expect that the same learning devices would hold true for the rest of us.
Rubel: So what do you think our preacher-writer would think of the “gospel of health and wealth” that so many people hear from Christian pulpits and televangelists today?
John: I suppose it might be one of two reactions: either he would smile at what he considered a rather childish belief system that could be so foreign to the life of Jesus himself, or he would react like the prophets of old and level a shotgun blast against the self-centered materialism that wants to substitute human success stories for the gospel.
Rubel: What you’re saying reminds me of some quotes I saw published a while back from comment cards turned in at Bridger Wilderness Area in the Teton National Forest of Wyoming. Remember now: This is a “wilderness” area. You would presume rough terrain, right? You would presume difficult hiking, right? Here’s what people wrote:
“Too many rocks in the mountains.”
“Trails need to be reconstructed. Please avoid building trails that go uphill.”
“Trails need to be wider so people can walk while holding hands.”
“Escalators would help on steep uphill sections.”
“Chair lifts need to be in some places so that we can get to wonderful views without having to hike to them.”
John: Whoa! That last one sounds like some of us Christians whining to God about our spiritual growth! God, we want you to get us to the mountain peaks without expecting us to climb – or sweat! If there is a recurring reality in the life of the early church, it is not that life suddenly becomes free of pain and suffering upon accepting Christ. Rather, the expectation is that his followers will share in his suffering.
In the ancient world there was a common saying: “To learn is to suffer.” Obviously the proverb can be reversed: “To suffer is to learn.” I’m reminded of the first day I tried snow skiing. I mastered the beginner’s slope pretty quickly, so my uncle took me on the chair lift to the top of the mountain. I thought I would never get back down! After what seemed like hours of falling on both hips until they were blue, I looked at my uncle with that look – you know, “I’m done now!” He smiled and looked back and said, “Be patient. If you’re not falling down, you’re not learning anything.”
Rubel: How do we get our heads around this concept? Maybe we need to post around this assembly hall for Christians what I hear is posted in lots of gyms: No pain, no gain!
John: Even so, we may need to qualify even that. Pain doesn’t guarantee gain. It only gives the opportunity for it.
Rubel: Quite so! Pain is sometimes enough to make people quit. Give up. Indict God for his cruelty. Or even to curse him. I can admire Job without wanting to live his experience of economic reversal, the death of his children, and excruciating physical suffering! Far be it from any one of us to be too arrogant in telling in advance how he or she would handle one or more of these awful blows. And far be it from us to be too quick to judge or censure someone whose knees buckle under pressure.
John: Our teacher knew this was a difficult lesson to grasp. So, in the first section of today’s text, he says:
We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil (5:11-14). Our preacher becomes the scolding parent at this point, attempting to shame his audience into a better performance. It’s not unlike the coach whose players have just had a miserable first half and he wants to shake them out of their lethargy by telling them that a grade school team could play better than that. His concern is that they should have become such a supportive community of faith that they didn’t need him to tell them how to deal with their circumstances. They should be teaching one another at this point, but they still required teaching from the outside. They should be mature, complete in their spiritual support of one another, not still-nursing children. Their constancy with God and his Word should mean constancy in their commitments rather than the wavering and doubt they are experiencing.
Rubel: So here comes the challenge:
Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And God permitting, we will do so (6:1-3). Rather than wait for an escalator to take you to the high peaks of faith, start climbing. Instead of griping about the lack of a chair lift, imitate Jesus your leader. Instead of staying an infant on milk for your entire Christian life, grow up – by chewing on solid food and exercising your spiritual muscles in Spirit-led discernment.
It is far too simplistic to say this is a challenge for Christians to advance beyond reading the Four Gospels and Acts so that we are finally reading Hebrews, Romans, and Revelation. That isn’t what our teacher means by distinguishing “milk” from “meat.” We “leave the elementary teachings about Christ” only in the sense that we move beyond those initial doctrines about repentance and faith that called us to baptismal commitment and laying-on-of-hands blessing and commissioning to shoulder our burdens, bear the heat of the day, and hold firmly to our profession of faith in the face of whatever trials come to us. We have, in fact, been taught that we will someday be raised from the dead and rewarded for whatever sufferings we have had to endure at the final Great Day.
I think it is particularly interesting that our preacher does not entertain for a moment the idea that this is a lift-yourself-by-your-bootstraps philosophy. It has nothing to do with works righteousness or being worthy of salvation. It is simply following the normal and expected course of walking in the footsteps of Jesus – and being perfected or matured in the process. The English reading is a bit misleading here. “Let us go on to maturity” is more literally “let us be carried to maturity.” In other words, creating Christlike character in a disciple is less our willpower than his Spirit-empowerment, less our strength than his, and less our accomplishment than his gift.
John: Anyone who doesn’t see the challenge of enduring, holding on, and being willing to suffer for Christ isn’t being realistic. That is why it is so false for people to leave the impression that being a Christian makes life easier. What we called health-and-wealth gospel is false gospel that sets people up to be destroyed. We begin to believe that living the American dream of health, wealth, success, and long life are almost owed to us because we’re good church-goers. When it doesn’t work that way – and it never does, even when it appears that way from a distance – then we begin to discover the importance of our faith and our community of faith.
Life isn’t fair! Every prayer for healing isn’t answered the way we would like. Every desire for the perfect job isn’t met. Job losses happen. Those we love die before we’re ready. Yes, we celebrate the victories; we celebrate those obvious moments when tragedy is overcome, when addictions are beaten, when success is celebrated as a gift from God. We also recognize that Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered, not through the success of his miracles. What a testimony we receive when Mark Burress says that his prayers were answered even in his death or Jeff and Becky Wallen stand at the memorial service of their son and announce they will give God praise even in the midst of their sorrow and pain.
Rubel: John, Terry Smith and I were having a conversation with another of those people in our church whose struggle has been very public and whose ordeal seems to be unrelenting. She was voicing her frustrations. She trusted us enough to tell us how angry and sad she sometimes felt. And she said something to this effect: “But, of course, I can’t say that out loud at church!”
I cut her off at that point – not to suggest that she had said something inappropriate that called for scolding, but to say that I thought it might be a good idea for her to do just that. Not every faith story ends in quick victory. Not every Daniel who gets thrown into a den of lions gets out without a scratch. There are lots of bones in those dens! So, Jennifer Stewart, would you come up here with John and me? Would you be willing to tell this church how you have felt lately?
Jennifer Stewart: Just over three weeks ago, I was on my way to work, as had become the usual since beginning my nursing career in February. I had grown accustomed to going to work, coming home, making things, fixing things, doing things – filling up my spare time with just about anything I could to make myself feel useful, to prove to myself that I was always doing something of importance, to avoid facing the feelings that I have managed to suppress most often quite convincingly, at least I like to believe, for the last several years. But this night was different. And I know why that was.
In an argument with a friend earlier that day, I was told that I needed to seek counseling, I needed to be medicated – that I had lost it. He could tell that I'm just not myself anymore. It's funny how sometimes you can grow so angry with someone for making a comment such as that based solely on your belief that they couldn't be more wrong. However, more times than not, I think being confronted with the truth is what hurts so much more, because sometimes they couldn't be more right. He was right. And as angry and hurt as I was that someone could believe that of me, I was absolutely astonished and totally unprepared to face the fact that I could have ever let myself get here, that at such a young age I had let life get the best of me. Yet, at the same time, in a way I was so very thankful that he had both the ability to recognize that, and even more, the courage to let me know that he did.
I stopped right in front of the hospital, five minutes from the start of my shift, literally crying so hard that I couldn't see the stoplight in front of me turning green. I knew that there was no way that I could possibly collect myself enough to walk through those doors and hold a child's life in my hands. The hypocrisy of a career founded on the basis of life being so precious when all I have wanted to do is have it end wasn't something I could fake anymore. I picked up the phone, without knowing who to call, without believing anyone would care, and immediately found myself dialing Terry Smith's number. I'm still uncertain as to how he managed to understand a word I said, as I cried uncontrollably for the entire conversation. But somehow he knew all that he needed to know – that I needed a friend. And that is what has led me here today.
I understand that I have lost it. I, not anyone else. I have chosen the path that my life has taken. The decisions that I have made, situations, relationships that I have either placed myself in, or stupidly removed myself from, I could have avoided.
What it is that I have lost is simple. It's hope – the hope that I will one day see my son walk, or hear him laugh. That I will see him off for his first day of school or stay up all night worrying when he's on a date at 16 and stays out too late. That anyone will ever know how wonderful he is, and what he could have been. The hope that everything he suffers through, all the teasing and stares and being left out isn't for naught, because if I can't believe in a God who would allow this, then I can't very well believe that there's a better life after this one. And the most wretched feeling of guilt that results from the hope that the next time he enters the hospital, he won't leave, not because I don't love him, but because I do. That's the hardest thing I have ever had to admit, not just to you, but to myself. Because I would trade places with him in a heartbeat. I have lost the feeling that I have control, because the one thing I want to change is out of my hands, and I don't know how to deal with that. I've lost the feeling that I belong, not just here, but anywhere. That I deserve to be loved. That I can fall down knowing that someone is there to catch me, no matter how badly I screwed up. That I can fail, and it's OK. The strength to carry the load that both life and myself have managed to pile up. But even more tragic, it's the will to want to.
But most importantly I have found in the last few weeks through meeting with both Terry and Rubel, I have lost it. It's not destroyed, not forever gone. It's simply beyond my grasp right now. I can't do it alone. I know that now. And even better, I know it's OK to say that. And that is part of the reason I am here. I realize that I am only one of the many people sitting here today with a broken heart. There isn't one of us whose life is any less important than another. And despite the fact that over the last few weeks I have begun to find hope again, and because of that, knowing how easy it would be to go on acting as if I am as strong as I have pretended to be for so long now, I felt it the right thing to do, to show the real me, at my worst, hoping that by doing so, any of you who are hurting can know that you are not alone. I owe that to my children, to you, but most of all to myself. To prove that there is no shame in letting everyone else see inside your heart. I need help. But more than anything, I need to know that I, that any of us, can come to each other to say that. To know that we are all in this life together.
That neither money nor distance nor bloodlines – nothing separates us. To remind myself that we are all children of God. We are all a family. And that when one of us has lost our way, the rest of us will do anything to bring them back. I have to believe that. And I thank you so much for affording me to opportunity to open up and finally begin to heal – from the inside out.
John: If church isn’t a safe-enough place for someone to voice these frustrations and pains, where is such a place? So often we start believing that only the good endings can be spoken at church. Only the completed success stories can be offered up to God. But that is the reality of lament in Scripture and in our lives, isn’t it? This is precisely what the preacher of Hebrews wanted from his audience. He wanted them to tell one another their stories and then hold one another up; hold each other in accountability and commitment in the name of Jesus. So, Rubel, in the face of something as real and personal to this church as what Jennifer has just said, what can a sermon series from Hebrews do for us? Is the preaching just scolding us and telling us to buck up? Or is there more to it than that?
Rubel: If it can’t help Jennifer or the Burresses or the Wallens or the rest of us with our struggles, we should find something that will! But what John and I believe, church, is that our preaching each week is set in the context of your economic stress, your marital problems, your bereavement, your doubts – and must bring a word from God to those situations. If we didn’t think the best way to help you was through Scripture, we’d just play tapes of Oprah and Dr. Phil on the big screen! For whatever insights of value you can get from psychology, group support, or a loving church, you ultimately need a word from God Almighty himself that will get you through.
John: And although the tradition of conservative churches such as ours is to stress the language of 6:4-12 about the possibility of spiritual apostasy, the thrust of this text is not negative. It does not seek to scare people about the fate they will suffer if they abandon Christ. This preacher’s goal is positive. He believes the best about his friends and spiritual family – and wants them to be encouraged.
Sometimes we lift verses 4-8 out of context and become consumed with our modern question of whether or not saved people can be lost. But if you listen to the words in the larger context, he has no interest in any of his believing audience losing their salvation. Yes, no one should neglect the great salvation that God has given in Jesus. Yes, if one rejects that salvation, either initially or especially after already receiving it, there are no alternative means of entering into God’s presence. If we reject Jesus as Lord and reject the participation of the Holy Spirit in our lives, God doesn’t have any other avenues into his presence. But that reminder is all for the purpose of reminding his audience of the gift they have received. Whatever the world around them may be saying about their newfound faith in Jesus, they need to trust God – not those empty voices. Listen to the preacher’s assurances regarding his listening audience:
Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are confident of better things in your case – things that accompany salvation. God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them. We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure. We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised (6:9-12). His focus is on the positive outcome of their communal commitments to Christ and to one another. This is a “ya’ll-project,” not an individual endurance contest. The diligence and hope that sustain come through their communal efforts to support one another.
Rubel: Precisely! And these strong words of encouragement are rooted in the history of God’s dealings with humankind across the centuries. In Hebrews 11, our writer will tick off a long list of names. God kept his promise to every one of those people! Here he cites only one example. His example is Abraham, the Father of All Those Who Have Faith in God.
Abraham’s life was a series of winding treks from Ur to Egypt, through Sodom and Shur – and he died never having inherited Canaan. Along the way, both he and Sarah laughed at the notion of a child in their old age. They even attempted surrogate motherhood with Hagar. Oh, the heartache that started! It was a long, tough, and painful journey. But Abraham was encouraged every step of the way, so our preacher says, by God’s “promise” vouchsafed to him. And that promise was rooted in two things. First, it was backed by God’s very character, his “unchanging nature.” Second, it was confirmed to Abraham by a covenant “oath” that was passed from Abraham to his heirs.
Now God has done a similar thing with Christians: “God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure” (6:18-19a). The same God who swore by his unchanging character to Abraham has made a covenant promise to all of us who have put our faith in Jesus Christ – and has further reinforced that covenant by making Jesus our eternal high priest who is even today functioning in the true Holy of Holies on our behalf (6:19b-20).
John: Here is what today’s text means, then, to all the Jennifer Stewarts of this church and to the entire family of God, to all of us who ever feel like we’re losing it. It means that we’re all in this together! It means we uphold one another precisely in the difficult times. To learn is to suffer; to suffer is to learn. Jesus grew back into his divine Sonship and was restored to the throne room of God in exactly the same way that God grows his divine nature in us and promises to bring us into that same heavenly realm. He does not leave us on our own, but calls us into relationship. Yes, those basic teachings that are our initial experiences of God’s salvation – our repentance and baptism and our belief that Jesus really was raised from the dead – need to be remembered. But we also have to help each other get through the painful training that is shaping us for eternity. It’s not easy. It’s not fair. Much of it comes without warning or provocation, and we can’t survive it alone. Thus, Jesus himself endured it so that he could plead our cause before God even as we cry out to God and to one another.
Rubel: Let me close with a final observation about a play on words in today’s text. Our teacher opens at 5:11 with a tongue-in-cheek comment about how “slow” (Gk, nuthros = sluggish) some of his students seemed to be and returns to the same word and theme at 6:12. In the second reference, however, he is actually voicing his confidence that they will not be “lazy” but faithful to their confession. And what had stung them awake from their sluggishness? Suffering! It makes weak Christians see just how desperately we need the strength of the Holy Spirit. In our weakness, we are able to sense his power at work (cf. 2 Cor. 12:7ff).
Again, however, I hasten to add that his strong confidence is not so much in them but in the certain promises God has made them. He is not about to abandon them in their crisis moments – even if there is no rescue from their suffering except through death and resurrection in a new heaven and earth. But God will not abandon them to the enemy. He will not allow anything to destroy their spiritual security.
We are at risk because Satan is intent on seducing us into evil; if he cannot do that, he will try to deceive us with the false doctrine that the negative things that happen in our lives are “acts of God.” We are at risk because life is hard; we sometimes cry out in our spiritual immaturity and indict God as a tormenter – something Job, for example, refused to do. We are at risk because our faith is weak; we need to press on from the elementary teachings about Jesus into the lifestyle of trust, submission, and obedience he modeled for us – even though that lifestyle invites suffering for the sake of righteousness. We are at risk because there is so much about living as human beings that is simply mysterious and defies explanation within our limited theological frameworks or personal insights.
Because we are at risk, we must believe. Believe that God is still on his throne, in spite of the terrible things sin has introduced into his cosmos. Believe that the God who cannot lie will keep his promise of deliverance – even if that deliverance comes only in the resurrection. Believe that our Melchizedekan high priest who sympathizes with our predicament has secured our redemption by blood and is interceding for us constantly at the mercy seat. Believe that the things through which we persevere in faith not only cannot destroy us but will serve to mature us, perfect us, form the image of Christ in us.
No matter what is threatening you today, you are challenged to believe. To endure. To suffer in hope. To look beyond the temporal to the eternal. To share his triumph at his appearing and kingdom. We are so confident of Jennifer, Ken and Ginger, Melanie and Gracie, and Jeff, Becky, and Jessie that we would like to close with our own expanded paraphrase of Hebews 6:9-12.
John and Rubel reading together: We are so confident of God’s ability to work in you – and of your demonstrated willingness to trust him through the dark circumstances of life on Planet Earth – that we believe the sort of steadfast faith that accompanies salvation will continue to be exhibited in this church. Our duty to one another is mutual support within this faith community, to be there for one another in trying times. God is not unjust, and he will not allow any of us to be tempted above what we can bear! No, he will help us as we help one another. And you may be absolutely confident that he will see you through to the end. He will validate your hope with the elation of triumph – even if, as in the case of his Beloved Son, the triumph comes after apparent defeat! So don’t get lazy, sluggish, or careless in your faith – especially if things are going well for you today. Don’t think for a moment that your time will not come. But know that God will be there in advance of your trial and will do for you what he did for Abraham, Joseph, and the thousands of others who persevered through faith. We will inherit all he has promised to those who love him. We have his word on it!
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